Boot Linux from the USB pen drive

[neta]

Modern Booting with the USB device


It is frankly speaking ,Linux is the frame of the reference of the development of the Computer system technology.


The scientists, also have come in the race of the evolution of the tecnology.
And, hence SLAX, DSL, Flash Linux have invented.Not only that ,it is also a serious challenge to them to make it more compatiable,implement more relax
sensitivity.


Hence ,they accept the challenge to boot the linux distribution from the USB pen drive.The newer motherboards now also come to support them in booting the linux from the USB drives as USBHDD,USBFDD and others ,such as USB-CDROM.


The first step using a pen drive is to delete the original pen drive partitions,if there is any.Then add a FAT16 partition,and format it with mkdosfs". "cddisk" or "fdisk" can be used here to do this.


Check your "dmesg" log when u plug-in the device to see if it is working.
dmseg | tail


A message should be appear similar to the following:
undefined sda:assuming drive cache:write through sda: sda1


Format the partition with the following
mkdosfs -F 16 /dev/sda1
(change sda1 to whatever partitions is appropriate for your system).


Unplug the hardware,and plug it again.It is now ready to install the distributions.


Enjoy with SLAX:


The SLAX site says "SLAX is a fast and beautiful linux operating system,which fits on a 8cm.

CD ROM disc. It runs directly from the CD( or USB) without installing.

The live CD described here is based on the Slackware Linux Distribution and uses the Unification File System(unionfs), allowing a read only file system to behave as a writable one,saving all changes to the memory." So,if we use pen drive ,don't have to worry,because the pen drive has writable memory.


SLAX Installations:


To install SLAX,first u get the latest edition of the SLAX(slax-5.0.7b.iso)


Mount the ISO image file of SLAX using the loopback device.Name the mount directory as slax
mount -o loop slax-5.0.7b.iso slax /


Copy all the files from the slax/ ,to the mounted pen drive:
cp -rav slax/* /mnt/usb


Synchronize the data
sync


Now copy the files 'vmlinuz' and 'initrd.gz' to the root directory, where you mounted the pen drive.
cp boot/vmlinuz
cp boot/initrd.gz


Then edit the file called 'isolinux.cfg'.
vi isolinux.cfg


Remove the every string called boot/ before 'vmlinuz' and initrd.gz.Then ,rename it to the "syslinux.cfg" to use syslinux with the device
mv isolinux.cfg syslinux.cfg


Finally, install and update MBR with LILO/GRUB.
lilo -M /dev/sda


And,use syslinux to finish the process
syslinux -s /dev/sda1


Atlast ,SLAX is get installed.Unmount the pendrive and reboot.Change the BIOS to boot from the USB pen drive and reboot again.


SLAX has KDE,FLUXBOX,K3b and many other applications.So,start now enjoy with SLAX.

(Try yourself with the DSL,Flash linux);